His imagination was fascinated by the boundless vistas opened to the student of chemistry.
When he first discovered that the four elements were not final, it gave him the acutest pleasure: and this is highly characteristic of the genius which was always seeking to transcend and reach the life of life withdrawn from ordinary gaze.

On the other hand he seems to have delighted in the toys of science, playing with a solar microscope, and mixing strangest compounds in his crucibles, without taking the trouble to study any of its branches systematically.

In his later years he abandoned these pursuits.

But a charming reminiscence of them occurs in that most delightful of his familiar poems, the "Letter to Maria Gisborne." While translating Pliny and dabbling in chemistry, Shelley was not wholly neglectful of Etonian studies.

He acquired a fluent, if not a correct, knowledge of both Greek and Latin, and astonished his contemporaries by the facility with which he produced verses in the latter language.